1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the area of computer systems, more particularly to method and apparatus for minimizing signal loss in transit.
2. Description of the Related Art
Faster and better performance has been always the driving force in the computer industry. One of the famous observations was made by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel. It is known as the Moore's law, which cites that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every 18 months. Although Moore's Law became known as the limit for the number of transistors on the most complex chips, it is also common to cite Moore's law to refer to the rapidly continuing advance in computing power per unit cost. Similar laws have been held true for other computer system components, such as hard disk and memory capacities, network communication speeds, internal computer bus speeds, and etc.
Many of today's computer systems are connected together to form a server farm or a cluster to handle the ever increasing demands. As the processor speed has increased many folds in the past decades, the bottleneck is the speed of the network interconnecting servers. The solution is to use a faster network such as InfiniBand technology, which allows up to 20 Gbits/sec throughput of data flow between processors and I/O devices. The InfiniBand technology can be used to connect servers with remote storage and networking devices, and other servers, and/or it can also be used inside servers for inter-processor communication in parallel computing clusters. However, owing to very fast speed, data signals become much more difficult to detect when moving from one point to the next. As a result, the data signals are lost at the receiving end and rendered useless. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a mechanism to minimize signal loss between two data communication ends.